Subpages cleanup: Complete Monster

What does that double percent symbol mean?

edited 23rd Jul '12 1:44:12 AM by DrPsyche

A %% symbol is a hidden note on the page. It's only visible if you open the page for editing or look at the source. It's supposed to leave messages to editors.

Where on the edit page would it appear, at the top?

Wherever you put it. If you put it on the top, it appears on the top.

Thank you

If anyone edits any of the remaining unlocked video game pages, you'll notice that the entire initial view of the page is filled with %% and a message from yours truly linking here and asking tropers to avoid natter and run their proposals by this forum first. It'd probably couldn't hurt if we added such a disclaimer to every open CM page; in fact Fast Eddie himself was the one who suggested doing so (specifically doing it in a manner that it will be the first and only thing an editor sees before they can scroll down to make their edits).

edited 23rd Jul '12 4:54:51 AM by Shaoken

I think, on YMMV pages, particularly ones where we've had issues keeping certain examples off, we actually need two. One at the top of the page, and one at the spot on the page where Complete Monster would go alphabetically.

So, with Carter Burke... The way I look at it, to judge the worthiness of a Complete Monster, you have to judge what they intended to do and their reaction to what they did do. Burke did not intend to basically wipe everyone out. That is what turned out to have happened, but it clearly wasn't his intention. So he certainly was not heinous in that regard.

Now, as for his Lack of Empathy - if he actually showed unbridled glee about the deaths of all the humans, then that would be under consideration. But as now? No. I know I'm a bit of a broken record when it comes to tweaking the trope description, but I think it should say "intentionally" somewhere on all that. Burke strikes me as the combination of Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds, Corrupt Corporate Executive, and Jerkass.

I also want to discuss Commodus from Gladiator. He is on the list, and while he is evil, isn't her too pitful to be a Complete Monster?

Okay, removed Facilier from The Princess And The Frog and put double percent notes both at the top and where Complete Monster used to be on the page.

For Commodius, I think we need a bit more detail as to what is involved. I personally haven't seen Gladiator.

Commodus murders his own father, blackmails his sister to sleep with him (threatening her with her son's life), kills the hero's wife and son. But he still pitful in some moments.

Let me discuss two villains at the same time though since I also want to talk about General Thade from Planet Of The Apes remake.

• General Thade from the 2001 Planet Of The Apes is a brutal leader of Ape armies, his brutality showing in enslaving humans and torturing them, which is without going to his intention towards them,extermination. In one scene, he also kills two of his henchmen, who told him about a crashed spacecraft, to ensure the information remains a secret.

To me that sounds like a standard villainy rather than CM acts.

edited 23rd Jul '12 6:31:02 AM by Krystoff

Factor in What Measure Is a Non-Human? (but applied from a talking Ape's perspective) and that pushes him further away from Complete Monster territory. What he's doing is wrong, but from his perspective he's just protecting his own society from the threats that are facing it.

I'm not saying that sadism is a requirement of a CM, but harming others needs to be a direct, rather than an indirect, consequence of his/her actions. Burke, and Weyland-Yutani by extension, didn't set out to murder all those colonists; they set out to retrieve a potentially useful alien life form whose existence they had reason to doubt. Once it was confirmed, Burke decided that the colony was a write-off and tried to stick to his original plan, which was to transport the alien to Earth for examination. That said plan happened to involve the deaths of the remaining members of the expedition was a necessary trade-off.

At no point here is he being deliberately malicious; only calculating and amoral. This is why I can't vote for him as a CM, despite the fact that his actions, by themselves, would certainly qualify if done for other reasons.

Well, becoming The Caligula and using those actions to support it do strike me as hitting the "heinous" part - particularly as I can even see Commodus leaving his nephew alive to use as a blackmail chip later. But I see a citation to Jerkass Woobie for him - any amount of Woobie-ness has me thinking disqualification.

@1936 sums up my thoughts on Thade.

It also seems so far that thoughts are unanimous on Burke for removal. Any objections to his removal?

Carter has been removed already. So has Thade.

Now I will move to the next one; Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He is on the list but all he tries to do is genoicide of his own species. Is that really that heinous? Isn't it more insane or sociopathic? Also his minions do not seem to be scared of him.

Commodus? Pitiful?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHANO. The man is pure, undiluted Nightmare Fuel and psychotic depravity from beginning to end.

He's pretty pathetic, honestly. He's so desperate for daddy to approve of him, despite his raving psychopathy, that he ends up murdering him. Also, he clearly does care about his sister, even if it is in a creepily incestuous way.

Judge Doom is depraved, maniacal, has no justification, unrepentantly commits evil acts, and is treated as a monster by the narrative. My only concern is that the work itself is PG and as such cannot show the kinds of things that would be required of a villain in a darker work.

By the standards of the work he's pretty fucking henious. Dipping that shoe into dip seemed like an incredibly painful way to die, plus two off-screen murders and the glee he takes in doing it all push him towards CM territory for me.

As for Commodus, I'd say he's very pitiful. He desperately wanted his father to be proud of him, compared himself and his own virtues and talents to his father, and in the scene where he kills him he's practically begging for his father's love. I'd vote for taking him off.

edited 23rd Jul '12 7:42:23 PM by Shaoken

I'm gonna have to contest the entry of Clu from Tron Legacy(I think Fighteer agrees with me on this one). For one, his actions are clearly horrific but he is programmed to bring utopia to the GRID. Sadly he is also programmed to destroy "holes" and "imperfections" which led to the genocide of IS Os, not knowing what Flynn saw the IS Os as. So in many ways he is a victim of his own programming, thus having a built-in excuse and we have to consider things like Blue-and-Orange Morality as well as What Measure Is a Non-Human?. He was programmed that way and lacked many of the ..........and Kevin Flynn did not know just how lethal the program was programmed. There is a debate on whether anyone without a user conscious can qualify as a CM in the Grid.

I will once again say that Sofia Lamb from Bioshock 2 should be cut since in one of the endings the door is arguably open for her to be redeemed, something that cannot ever happen to CM characters. This is a key disqualification.

As for Saren..........I'm actually not sure, but I would lean torwards disqualification. He does have some Knight Templar Well-Intentioned Extremist views and he can also be talked down ingame. But in the novels he's a dick. However it can also be argued that it just establishes him as a person prone to indoctrination, but arguably not a full CM.

edited 23rd Jul '12 10:02:15 PM by xie323

Clu, if all you say is true, would fail to meet the criteria for Complete Monster.

Lamb on the other hand I oppose removing, since in the ending you described she's only saved from death, and that is the full extent of her appearance in the ending. Nothing to saw she's on the path to redemption, only that she was spared by someone she tried to kill and lost everything in the process.

Judge Doom is totally irredeemable. And I'm sorry, did we just say he "only" wanted to commit genocide on his own species? It's genocide. It takes a lot to overcome the heinousness of the idea of genocide, and Doom does himself no favors by being utterly unrepentant and gleeful about his work.

As for Clu, I do think that he is simply a Well-Intentioned Extremist who took his programming instructions ("fix imperfections") waaaay too literally. Obviously his methods went way too far (again with near-genocide of an entire species), but because of his computer programming, he literally has no other function to carry out. He doesn't understand human morality enough to know what he did to the IS Os was wrong. I second his removal.

Some Warhammer40000 examples are questionable(And they aren't even that horrific for that setting)

• Abaddon the Despoiler, despite his reputation as General Failure, definitely qualifies for this trope. To him, the Black Crusades weren't failures because he got to do what he loves to do the most: kill the lapdogs of the False Emperor. Abaddon's purpose for being revolves around destroying and killing everything in the way of his ultimate goal — to unite humanity under the dark banner of Chaos — and with the powers of Chaos backing him up during a Black Crusade, that reach spans the entire galaxy. Now, if he wasn't always blocked at Cadia...

That just makes him a Generic Doomsday Villain with take over the Galaxy ambibions. Not exactly "horrifically evil" for that setting which has a REALLY, REALLY high bar for evil. I vote for either cut or rewrite.

• And on the subject of Chaos, Tzeentch, god of deception, mutation, manipulaton, magic and hope. This is a being that even the other Chaos Gods are wary around, ganging up on Tzeentch (which is remarkable considering how much they hate each other) when it was at the height of its power because not even they wanted that. Khorne just wants to kill people, Slaanesh is interested more in sensations for itself than inflicting them on others (though the two tend to intersect), and Nurgle genuinely cares about its followers. Tzeentch however constantly screws over everyone, from its most loyal followers to entire civilizations, just because it can, concerned not with motives of goals but with pure, unrestricted change.

He's the God of Change, and of Magnificent Bastard, making him a MB himself. And guess what? Also the god of hope as well. A "positive" emotion. The morality of him and any Chaos God is [[Blue-and-Orange Morality too unknown and incomprehensible by any means. So he's cut.

• Other Chaos champions aren't exactly fluffy bunnies either, made even worse by comparing them to who they once were. Take Lorgar for example, founder of a Religion of Evil and basically the cause of the Horus Heresy, a galaxy-spanning civil war from which it is still feeling the effects ten thousand years later, in stark contrast to his prior devotion of the emperor to the point of trying to depict a diety (which ironically happened after the Horus Heresy put him on the Golden Throne). Or Konrad Curze, essentially Batman if he were pure evil and possessed the powers of a demi-god, dedicated to making entire planets literally die from fear, a far cry from the Vigilante Man who truly cared for his people. Or Angron, an individual of such unrelenting fury and obssession with slaughter that Kharn, famous for shattering two entire Legions in a single night because they dared to stop fighting, was considered a calming influence, perhaps born from the Emperor wisking him away from what would have been his last stand and leaving his army to die instead of helping. There are followers with some sympathy (like Fulgrim and Magnus), but in general Chaos both attracts and creates the worst beings imaginable.

The Chaos Primarchs all needs expansion, and the content of this all feel like generic villains in this setting. And Lorgar is just batshit obsessive in his worship of the Emperor. Through the only CS Ms that I find qualify for said trope are Lucius and Fabius tabletop-wise. The Dawn Of War example qualifies through, as said game has a lower bar for evil than the tabletop itself.

I would like to factor Doombreed into this trope through. He seems to have traits based on several of Earth's worst dictators and tyrants(not getting into any Real Life), is assumed to be one(not linking to the most popular candidate because it factors into Real Life) or a personification of all of them and has committed very horrific acts as a human.

edited 23rd Jul '12 10:35:38 PM by xie323

CLU 2: Genocide against the ISO programs, as well as killing and brainwashing many of the regular programs. He has one of the largest kill counts of any Disney character. Yet, the progrming thing is a valid issue. He even lampshades it when he yells at Flynn that everything he did was in the pursuit of perfection. I argue that he should be cut.

Doom: Wanted to kill all of the toons to make a highway.

• He's treated as serious
• His actions are heinous by the story standards
• Shows no regret.

I remember reading somewhere that Doom was a cartoon villain actor who got hit on the head and came to believe that he was really one. However, I did not see any evidence of that in the film.

EDIT: When we're done with these two and the Warhammer examples, can we discuss Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2?

edited 23rd Jul '12 10:56:39 PM by DrPsyche

Sure, I wanted to discuss him too. I requested to remove Commodus already. Since we are discussing Clu already, lets also discuss Master Control from the original who could count in fact.

edited 24th Jul '12 1:35:18 AM by Krystoff

Well, to be fair, Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit does kill two on-screen - the shoe that gets dipped as well as R. K. Maroon (he's technically just off-camera when he does it, but the murder is still shown, and he admits to it). As pointed out, he does attempt genocide, as well. The motive for these crimes? The first was just to intimidate Roger (and it was done tortuously slow, too), and the latter two was simply to make money building a freeway. It's not so much whether he succeeds; it's a question of what the consequences would be if he succeeds.

Call it my old Catholic upbringing - an attempt at a sin is still quite blatantly a sin in my eyes. I'm with Largo on this one; Doom's lack of success doesn't change the fact that he's attempted some of the most heinous crimes of anyone on the list. I'm good with keeping Judge Doom.

If Clu was programmed to try to bring about a utopia, that alone is enough of a good intention to qualify as a Well-Intentioned Extremist in my eyes, and thus disqualified.

For those 40K examples...

On Abbadon, yeah, maybe in another universe, but the original home of Grimdark needs more evil than that.

I won't touch the Blue-and-Orange Morality argument, but being the God of Hope does imply that there's some good in Tzeentch and thus would disqualify him/her.

The Chaos Primarchs need individual sections and arguments. I'm tempted to cut and have people come here to justify restoring them.

If you want to discuss an example, just bring up said example. It might take time, but it will be discussed.